I saw potatoes dug from the soil in a cool greenhouse, in April, to
the amount of five bushels to the twenty-one feet square. And when
chance brought me, in 1896, in company with a local gardener, to a
tiny, retired “vinery” of a veteran grower, I could see there, and
admire, what a lover of gardening can obtain from so small a space as
the two-thirds of an acre. Two small “houses” about forty feet long
and twelve feet wide, and a third--formerly a pigsty, twenty feet
by twelve--contained vine trees which many a professional gardener
would be happy to have a look at; especially the whilom pigsty,
fitted with “Muscats”! Some grapes (in June) were already in full
beauty, and one fully understands that the owner could get in 1895,
from a local dealer, £4 for three bunches of grapes (one of them
was a “Colmar,” 13¾ lb. weight). The tomatoes and strawberries in
the open air, as well as the fruit trees, all on tiny spaces, were
equal to the grapes; and when one is shown on what a space half a ton
of strawberries can be gathered under proper culture, it is hardly
believable.
It is especially in Guernsey that the simplification of the
greenhouse must be studied. Every house in the suburbs of St. Peter
has some sort of greenhouse, big or small. All over the island,
especially in the north, wherever you look, you see greenhouses.
They rise amid the fields and from behind the trees; they are piled
upon one another on the steep crags facing the harbour of St.
Peter; and with them a whole generation of practical gardeners has
grown up. Every farmer is more or less of a gardener, and he gives
free scope to his inventive powers for devising some cheap type of
greenhouses. Some of them have almost no front and back walls--the
glass roofs coming low down and the two or three feet of glass in
front simply reaching the ground; in some houses the lower sheet of
glass was simply plunged into a wooden trough standing on the ground
and filled with sand. Many houses have only two or three planks, laid
horizontally, instead of the usual stone wall, in the front of the
greenhouse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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